


Hey Rester, Can We Go Toy Shopping?

by Skaapsteker



Category: Death Note (Anime & Manga)
Genre: Crack, Gen, implausible walkie-talkie mechanics, yes I know that Toys R Us doesn't operate in the US anymore
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-21
Updated: 2018-05-21
Packaged: 2019-05-09 19:37:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,426
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14722329
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Skaapsteker/pseuds/Skaapsteker
Summary: Near takes advantage of Black Friday.(Inspired by a Tumblr post.)





	Hey Rester, Can We Go Toy Shopping?

**Author's Note:**

> Inspired by this Tumblr post: luminouslawliet.tumblr.com/post/90302619761/fanfic-where-near-makes-rester-gevanni-and

A few days after Thanksgiving, Rester was called to Near’s television-wallpapered room.  
“Rester, I ask a favour of you and the other two members of the SPK,” said Near, briefly pausing in the construction of one of his trademark dice towers.  
“Yes, Near?”  
“This Friday is Black Friday, meaning that all stores will be holding sales. I would like to go to the closest Toys R Us and, as I do not and cannot have a credit card, have you make the purchases that I request.”  
Rester hesitated. “Are you sure about this, Near?’  
“Yes.”  
“Oh. Alright, then, we’ll do it.”  
“Thank you.” Near said as he completed the turret of his die castle.

 

DAWN OF BLACK FRIDAY  
6 HOURS REMAIN

As the sun rose outside, Near did not see it, since he was in a room with no imaginable access to natural light. Maybe on another day, he would’ve spend half a second pondering the good ol’ “did the sun still rise if I didn’t see it”, before realizing how utterly shitty of a thought that was and mentally kicking himself for spending even a fraction of a second seriously thinking about it.  
But no. Today was not that day. Today, his sizeable mind was focused on an entirely different matter - namely, the legendary event that was about to go down.  
And for all his deductive skills, Near wasn’t quite sure whether its legendariness would be in an intensely sarcastic sense or not.  
Either way, it was Toys R Us on Black Friday, so it was bound to be properly euphoric.  
Near looked at his LEGO configuration, feeling echoes of that future joy.

 

MORNING OF BLACK FRIDAY  
THREE AND A HALF HOURS REMAIN

Halle Lidner downed a can of Red Bull as she dusted the video monitors, artfully stepping around the toys that lay on the floor. She was AWAKE and ALIVE and she KNEW WHAT SHE BELIEVED IN. (Contrary to what most would assume, Lidner was an avid fan of Skillet.)  
Meanwhile, in the next room over, Gevanni was waltzing to the soundtrack of a certain soon-to-be-infamous children’s movie. This was his way of getting prepared for likely bumping into kids on the job. (How did she know he was waltzing, one may ask? If one lived in close proximity to Gevanni for any significant length of time, one would come to recognize the sound of his waltz, as opposed to the sound of his tango or his cha-cha-cha.) He had also drunk a not-insignificant amount of Red Bull.  
Meanwhile, Near and Rester were sitting on the floor together, contemplating the fact that they were light-haired dudes who were not in altered states of mind.  
“Don’t worry about the Red Bull, Rester,” said Near, twirling his hair. “The metabolic half-life of caffeine is only forty-five minutes.”

 

Finally, the time came. Near and the SPK stood just outside the not-so-pearly automatically-opening gates of Toys R Us, each of them armed with a walkie-talkie and a formidably-stuffed wallet. Lidner and Gevanni were slightly twitchy but mostly normal again.  
“Ready?” asked Near, making his voice as deep as he could (i.e. not very) and giving everyone his living C: emoticon of a smile.   
They nodded.  
“CHARGE!”  
It turned out to be a quiet, slo-mo charge, since there were a bunch of other people around and no one likes getting knocked over by random strangers, but it was still pretty epic.  
Each of them grabbed a shopping cart except for Near, who clambered up into Rester’s. This was to keep common folk from suspecting that he could possibly be important to the continued safety of the world. This was also a pretty easy masquerade to keep up, though.  
They walked slowly and deliberately into the main body of the store. Rester looked almost unflappable, effect as always ruined by his soft eyes. Near looked like he always did, but for the slightest hint of excited tremor in his face and hands. Gevanni, for whatever reason, had his mind looping on “what what what what”, but in a slangy cool-dude way rather than in a confused way. Lidner’s mozzarella-like hair whipped majestically around her face.  
They were the most beautiful detective task force to ever raid a toy store.  
Rester went down into the building toys aisle, and Near’s eyes were greeted by shelves upon shelves of LEGOs and related toys. The factory-molded plastic packages were decorated in kaleidoscopic colours, windows to what products lay inside. And the shelves themselves rose high above the speckled tile floors, like Eiffel Towers - no, Empire State Buildings - no, Burj Khalifas stocked with creative potential! Near could almost feel the smooth plastic under his fingers, clicking into new shapes as he desired. His emoticonish smile returned, stronger and less fleeting now.  
Meanwhile, Lidner and Gevanni were in the action figure and doll aisles, respectively. By pure coincidence, they happened to pull out and switch on their walkie-talkies at almost exactly the same time. However, Gevanni took a moment to look around before speaking to Near, giving Lidner the upper hand.  
“Lidner reporting for duty,” she said. “I am in the action figure aisle. There are Transformers and Bionicles and the like on the shelves around me. There is also a woman with a young son, and they are looking at the Bionicles together. Over.”  
“Gevanni reporting for duty. I am in the doll aisle. There are a metric buttload of Barbies and My Little Ponies and stuff. There are two little girls here, one shopping with her mom and the other with her dad. Over.”  
“All clear? Over.” they asked in rapid sequence.  
Near lifted his own walkie-talkie to his mouth. “Yes. Proceed. Over.”  
“Mommy, what is that lady doing?” asked the Bionicle-loving boy.  
“I don’t know,” said his mother, a hint of nervousness in her voice. “Come on, Timmy, let’s look at the LEGOs instead. She ushered him out of the aisle, but the beauty that was Halle Lidner paid them no mind.  
“There’s a special-edition Bumblebee figure on sale for $10.49,” she said, craning her neck up to get a closer look. “Over.”  
“Yo, Near,” said Gevanni, “there’s a Cheerilee figure - you know, from My Little Pony - if you like that kind of thing. Over.”  
“Look at this LEGO set,” said Rester, bending over and taking a Hogwarts set off the lowest shelf.  
“YES.” said Near, in a very un-Near-ish voice. One might even call it… a Far voice.  
As his arms dropped to his side, his face and hands twitching like a twitchy dude, little Timmy and his mother entered the building aisle.  
“Mommy, I don’t like these people,” said Timmy. “They’re scary.”  
His mother sighed. “Timmy, let’s go for ice cream. We can come back later.” She took her son’s arm and began to speedwalk to the exit.  
“Yes to all of them,” Near repeated, then turned to Rester. “Gangway!”  
With a push like an enraged wildebeest, Rester shot out the aisle, throwing the Hogwarts set next to Near as he did so. He stopped approximately two seconds away from crashing into Lidner, who took a few alarmed steps back.  
“I’m assuming Phase Two has begun,” she said, placing the packaged Bumblebee figure in her cart.  
“Let’s find Gevanni,” said Near, and they dashed off, adding the final member of the SPK to their gloried ranks.

They all cycled back to the building aisle, where the SPK spent a good ten minutes depleting the crops of the store shelves. Rester got overinvested and ended up almost completely burying Near in cubic building block packages. Gevanni looked worriedly at the now-reclining detective, but he shook his head slightly and assured him that he was fine.  
For the second time that day, they rocketed out of the block aisle, and Near felt the wind ruffling his white curls. Strangely, he could swear he felt sunglasses resting on his face, even though he knew full well that that wasn’t the case.  
They entered the doll aisle, where Near rested his eyes upon plastic people with impossible proportions and equally plastic ponies with butt-stamps. Ah, but toys were never not toys.  
“Take all the ponies from the shelves, Gevanni,” he ordered. “Except for that neon green-and-yellow one.” Internally he wondered what the ever-living hell would drive someone to mass-produce such a huge eyesore, and quickly arrived at the answer: $$$.  
“Do I take _all_ of the ponies, or just one of each kind?” Gevanni asked.  
“One of each. We have to leave some for the-“ Near had to stop himself from just saying “kids” - “ _other_ kids.”  
“But you’re a boy!” Near looked to the left of the cart, where a tween girl was staring at him.  
“This is a toy store,” said Lidner, looking down at the girl. “This is a place where all dreams become realities and some realities become dreams. I don’t think my… lovely… son can be denied anything in such a dreamland without it turning to straight-up cruelty.”  
The girl considered this nugget of esoteric wisdom before nodding her head and bouncing off, rejoining her mother at the end of the aisle.  
“What about the dolls, Near?” asked Rester, the tips of his fingers on a Barbie package.  
“Same protocol,” said Near, ineffectually moving his hand. “Take one of each.” He tried to knock back his head, but the LEGO containers were cold, hard, and unforgiving, so he resigned himself to a crick-in-neck-inducing position.  
In a whirlwind of pastel colours, Gevanni’s cart was filled with playful joy, just like Rester’s.  
“Now we just need another detective to stuff under all this,” the agent joked, scratching the back of his black-haired head. Near just looked at him steelily.

Next was the action figure aisle that Lidner had initially been stationed in. This one deserved the majority of Near’s scrutiny - action figures had _franchises_ , franchises that he knew and loved. He needed to make sure that he never had two of the same, and get as many different types as possible.  
To entertain themselves while Near, pushed by Rester, peered intently at the stock, Lidner and Gevanni began to chat up the roaming parents (and, with permission, their kids). This also served the purpose of keeping any fellow shoppers from asking questions that none of the SPK wanted to answer, ranging from “Why do you have walkie-talkies?” to “Why are your carts full of everything and the kitchen sink?” to “WAIT, WHY IS THERE A KID BURIED IN BOXES? THAT’S GOTTA BE UNSAFE!”  
“I must say, that is an excellent choice of toy,” said Gevanni in a posh voice to a little girl.  
“This man’s so funny, Daddy!” she said, giggling and clutching her figure set closer.  
“The Transformers were pretty neat back then,” said Lidner to a woman who, as it turned out, was a fan of the franchise herself.  
After several minutes of this, Near was ready. Lidner and Gevanni bid quick goodbyes to their casual masks and turned to their noncasual selves, basking in the rapture of sales as their leader did. The store was like a delirious heart, throbbing to the headbanging rhythm of the SPK. In the action figures aisle, the parents and children backed away nervously.  
Gevanni picked up a Starscream figure. In any other moment, it would’ve been just a hunk of plastic to him, but on this day it shone from within, almost radiating heat for the soul.  
“Does this have any electric components?” he wondered aloud, pondering whether the heat might’ve also been physical in nature. But no one heard him. Such was the lamentation of the Black Friday-edition Gevanni.  
“Rester, today we go to toyfinity and beyond!” Near suddenly exclaimed.  
“Who are you and what have you done to Near?” Lidner inquired. This earned nothing but a (slightly more) unsettling version of the smile that Near had been wearing the entire trip.

Then they were off like a quartet of shooting stars, bound for the distant shores of the electronics aisle.  
In a burst of adrenaline, Gevanni put one foot on the lowest part of the cart, kicking back the other.  
“THIS IS EFFING AWESOME!” he yelled, then blushed deeply when he remembered that there were kids around. The waltzing-to-a-movie soundtrack plan had obviously been ineffective. (Maybe he should try to rumba to a TV show soundtrack next time?)  
They hit the aisle like the shopping meteors-  
“Meteor _ites_ , Rester,“-  
that they were, leaving a trail of dust in their wake. The robots seemed to spring to life the moment Near looked at them, a beautiful cacophony of fizzing circuits.  
“What is this, a commercial?” Lidner asked, taking a folded-up garbage bag from her purse and shovelling in robots.  
“No, it’s the real life.” Gevanni replied, braking to a halt.  
“IS THIS THE REAL LIFE-“ Rester began, but the withering glares of his colleagues quickly silenced him.  
It was wordless this time, the harvest of toys. Dinosaurs that moved and shuffled were plucked from the shelves like apples from a tree. The arms of the agents moved like robotic scythes or whatever it is that farmers use these days.  
It was a brief harvest, too, and so the time came for the final aisle: the games aisle.

“Monopoly is an oxymoron,” said Rester after some quiet contemplation. “It literally means ‘one many’.”  
“It’s actually an economic term that means-“ Lidner began, but Rester cut her off.  
“Well, then the term is an oxymoron.”  
“Good point.”  
“All. Of. The. Games.” Near interjected. “Especially the dice.”  
And before they knew it, their grand trip was over, the last wave of toys shoved into Gevanni’s pocket garbage bag.  
They strode up to the cashier with utmost majesty, like heraldic gryphons in human shape. The cashier took one look at them, and underwent the quickest change of facial expression any of the four had ever seen. Before she’d even finished turning her head, she’d already gone all the way from “customer service cheerful” to “OH MY FRICK WHO EVEN ARE THESE PEOPLE”, and a few seconds later she practically had dollar signs for eyes. It was quite the montage!  
As the SPK paid up, Near knew that they’d likely made that expressional lady’s career. And as the toys were loaded into the van and he was getting out of the cart, he knew that this day had also made his career - in terms of neck pain levels, that is.  
“Let’s go home and ride this bountifulness,” Near said grandly, in a way that only the world’s greatest detective could, and everyone nodded like penguins.


End file.
